2019 Financial and Travel Goals

A few weeks ago I read the blog post “Planning for a Great New Year? Start with Self-Reflection Before Setting Goals” of Keith Rosen.

In this blog post, Keith states that most people set the wrong goals and never take time to celebrate their successes over the prior year. Before you begin your goal-setting mission, you need to start with self-reflection. Otherwise, when do you acknowledge your wins and how much you’ve grown? Doing so will ensure your new goals are aligned with your values and priorities to create your best year yet.

Keith also outlines 8 steps to create an extraordinary 2019. I will apply those steps in our goal setting time. The first step is the definition of our personal vision statement.

Our Personal Vision Statement

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. I couldn’t agree more…

In every area, such as finance, relationships, career, health, home, community, lifestyle, spirituality, and so on… when you craft a clear vision statement of who you are and what you want your life to be, only then you can set the right goals that are aligned with your ideal life.

Our ideal life in the future is being financially free and no longer depend on one salary income. Wealthy people focus on creating multiple income streams. If we simply imagine a blank canvass, what would our clear vision statement be?

Our VISION is to LEARN HOW TO GROW MONEY and help other people on the path to their financial goals. We will have a financial impact on people’s lives going forward. I already have an impact on my foster child future in Nepal by paying her education until she graduates from university. That is our purpose in life. In addition to our financial goals, we ENJOY LIFE BY TRAVELLING THE WORLD and add travel experiences to our travel story book.

Our Core Values

Values are the things that keep us in integrity. They are a reflection of who you are. I always strongly focus on values within my relationships with other people. I stay away from dishonest, negative minded, irrespectful and complaining people.

Our values are love, lifelong learning, positively impacting and supporting others, focus on achievement, life balance, stay humble, respect and honesty.

Now we are ready to set our value-based goals!The defined goals are specific, measurable and have a 2019 year end deadline associated to them.

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.”

– Zig Ziglar

Our 2019 Financial goals

Recently we have defined our Investor & Trader skill set mapping. It was a great visual representation for what knowledge we have. in 2019 our goal is to improve the yellow boxes and add the blue skills to our knowledge.

So here are our five 2019 financial goals

1. Achieve a total of 15.000$ passive income for the total year 2019. Increase our monthly passive income to at least 700$. That is an increase of 200$ per month.
2. Add ONE more trading skill set to our knowledge base.
3. Put my mom’s portfolio at work and generate at least a yearly 3.500$ passive income. That equals a 290$ a month. That is the same amount as last year. We will focus more on passive investing methods for my mom’s portfolio.
4. Continue to grow my foster child and my kids’ portfolio. Monthly contributions for the portfolio of my foster child and dividend income focus for my kids’ portfolio. Grow our dividend and/or options income in my kids portfolio to 1000$ for the whole year. 
5.  Give our sons at least 8 FINANCIAL educational lessons and teach them financial literacy, entrepreneurship and a growth mindset.

Last year we researched how we can enable each son to invest or trade his 1000 euro and start to learn how to grow this money. Kids younger than 18 are not allowed to manage their own investment account. How stupid is that law ? We did find a solution for this problem. Stay tuned and you will learn how we will solve this.

In 2018 we didn’t hit the 10K challenge and now you set 15K as a target….I also hear you thinking. Well…we are aiming high to challenge ourselves. We discussed this objective with our mentor and if we improve our trading skills while keep on investing in our portfolio, 15.000$ must be achievable…

Our 2019 Travel goals

In our life we focus on spending money on experiences instead of buying things. Travel is a perfect way to relax and learn new things.

In 2019 we will continue to save money for our travel plans or local visits to interesting places in Belgium. 2019 will be a very special year for our travel plans.

Here are our five travel goals

1. Let’s do our honeymoon. Past years we couldn’t fit in a honeymoon financially, nor time-wise. 2019 will be the year that Mrs DividendCake and myself travel to a honeymoon location. If you have ideas or suggestions for the perfect honeymoon location, write it below in the comments section. 
2. Plan and relax two weeks somewhere in the world with the family for a SUMMER vacation
3. Visit this year three interesting spots in Belgium where kids can learn something and have a unique experience to remember. They don’t have to cost money to be great.
4. Do ONE city break vacation in 2019 with one of the kids. In 2018 we executed our “Travel with a budget” city trip. Let’s do something similar this year. Destination ideas are always welcome.
5. Post a blog post of each travel or visit experience. Grow the popularity of the blog.We have today 53K visitors per month. Let’s keep on growing this number.
6. Inject the kids with cultural insights during our travel and teach them about history and other important facts in life. Write a travel chapter in their life story book.

DONE ! Ready with our goal setting for 2019. Now it’s time to put our plan in action to list our required actions for each of the defined goals to achieve success. We start to plan, prepare, collect information and execute throughout the year.

Gratitude, Challenges & Accountability

In step 4 to 8 Keith Rosen defines the additional actions needed to complete the process. Personally I am very grateful that the above defined vision is shared with Mrs DividendCake. Sharing the same financial vision is critical for a couple, otherwise you pull in different directions.

The main challenge that I want to overcome in 2019 is the risk reward management piece. This risk reward skill set will be super important to be successful going forward. 90% of traders fail because they don’t have their risk reward management properly defined and executed.

Step number 8 is to find an accountability partner while honoring our lifestyle and daily routine. This is very simple…it’s YOU, our blog follower.

Final words 

Now we can design our strategies for goal-attainment and start planning. We can identify the daily activities that are aligned with our goals, vision and priorities, which will ultimately be reflected in our daily routine. This will keep us focused on moving forward, while honoring what is most important to us.

As you can read, 2019 will be a challenging and exciting year. In the coming month of February we will focus on our strategies and our additional skill set that we plan to add to our knowledge. Stay tuned..

In 2019 we also plan to send out ONE newsletter per month to our blog followers. Life can be busy sometimes and people lose track of following a personal finance and travel blog. Subscribe and you will get one email per month highlighting what you missed…

Good luck with your personal finance strategy! Thanks for following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading this blog post. As always we end with a quote.